Interpersonal violence by authoritarian rulers: Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin compared
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why do some authoritarian rulers, such as Saddam Hussein, kill or torture other people personally, whereas others, like Joseph Stalin, delegate such violence to subordinates? Such politically motivated interpersonal violence committed by authoritarian leaders has never before been theorized. Through a comparison of Hussein and Stalin, we explain why some dictators engage in this behavior and others do not. We propose a model based on three components: the individual's prior habituation or non-habituation to violence; regime characteristics that ‘select for’ a personally violent or non-violent ruler; and, once a ruler takes power, the interaction of the first two variables. We also suggest that most communist regimes featured organizational characteristics that discouraged such violence by the leader.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it